A Future Lived in Past Tense

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Can you ever have too much good music? Ask Juno, and they'd certainly say no.
After all, their new album, A Future Lived in Past Tense, is close to
70 minutes long, with quite a few tracks ranging between seven and ten minutes
in length. There aren't many bands that can pull this off, but Juno proved on
their 1999 debut, This is the Way It Goes and Goes and Goes, that
they're capable of crafting highly intriguing compositions over extended
periods of time. That record was a masterpiece of soaring guitar rock, and
not a note of it was wasted. But a few listens to this sophomore effort
should give an indication of just how thin the line between "trance-inducing"
and "sleep-inducing" can be.

This isn't to say that the entirety of A Future Lived in Past Tense is
boring; it's not, and fans of the first Juno album should find much to love
here. Examples: after a keyboard-driven opening instrumental, the band kicks
it into high gear with "Covered with Hair," a whirlwind assault of the band's
distinctive three-guitar sound with frontman Arlie Carstens' expressive,
angstful vocals evening things out. "Help is On the Way" takes a slightly more
laidback approach, with repetitive, twanging guitars and a steady, thumping
punk beat.

Juno have definitely calmed since their debut, as "The Trail of Your Blood in
the Snow" will attest. A slow number with tinkling piano and a shuffled beat
under the wintry atmosphere of hushed vocals and melodic guitars, it's easily
one of the gentler track in the band's catalog. If the rest of the album
sounded like this, it's doubtful anybody would complain about Juno's newfound
quietude.

However, "The French Letter" takes the sobriety to a new level, as the song
takes nearly seven minutes to build to a climax. Shambling percussion and
slow, strummed guitars plod lifelessly, obviously in no hurry to get anywhere.
When the song finally gets around to exploding, the result is admittedly
rousing. Still, the average American spends over five years of their life
waiting in traffic; do we really need our music to replicate this experience?

More successful is the 9+ minute "We Slept in Rented Rooms," which features
great lyrics like, "We used each like axes/ To cut down the ones we really
love." Carstens' confessionals are layered over delicate, interweaving guitars
and a complex beat, holding attention by incorporating just enough melodic
shifts and yelled vocals to temporarily lift the somber mood. "Things Gone
and Things Still Here," on the other hand, is a long-winded spoken word
narrative whose sparse musical backing remains almost completely static
throughout its 8\xBD minute length. Carstens' creative lyrics imagine a close
friend as she might be at the age of 73, reading over their old correspondence.
But lyrical bright spots aside, the music here has little to recommend-- even
the band's powerhouse guitars are absent.

Fortunately, A Future Lived in Past Tense's last two proper songs,
"Killing It in a Quiet Way" and "You Are the Beautiful Conductor of This
Orchestra" (yeah, the titles are pretentious-- deal with it) pick up the pace
with more of the blistering post-punk that made Juno's debut such a kick-ass
record.

As with many long albums, A Future could have benefited greatly from a
shorter running time and some better sequencing-- for instance, any sequencing
that didn't cram the three longest songs into tracks 6, 8, and 9. But
regardless of these flaws, Juno delivers a fairly strong album, particularly
the first half. The songs that manage to rock as hard as This is the Way's
best moments uphold that record's legacy, even with bassist Travis Saunders
supplanted by interim replacements Nick Harmer of Death Cab for Cutie and Nate
Mendel of the Foo Fighters. The more solemn tracks... eh, they're mostly okay.

So, to answer my own question, can you have too much good music? Definitely
not; if Juno had delivered 70 minutes of quality along the lines of "The Trail
of Your Blood in the Snow" or "Help is on the Way," you wouldn't be putting up
with my bitching right now. But can you have too much mediocre music? Yeah.
Hell, yeah.